What is the Future of Education Design?
- Murray Robertson
- May 14
- 3 min read
Schools create communities. Becoming more human with AI and user participation.
Murray Robertson’s Reflections on the Learning Environments Australasia regional conference in Brisbane, LEA 3001: A Learning Space Odyssey, 7 – 9 May 2025
Last week, Hannah and I went to the LEA conference in Brisbane. This was my 10th conference and Hannah’s second. These conferences are important to me as I believe that the design of good learning spaces requires a base of experience and research. While I had undertaken a lot of personal research, my first conference in 2013 helped give me a broad, holistic understanding of education space design.
The conference is a chance to recharge and be inspired. This is more important than ever in this somewhat difficult time. Is there still a place for architects in school design in New Zealand beyond some residual, easily replaced compliance requirements?
I was confronted by the optimism of the first keynote, Demographer Simon Kuestenmacher and Brisbane in general. With worsening global geopolitics, he saw nothing but optimism and growth for the Australian economy. At morning tea, a local architect talked of turning away work and not being able to find enough staff. Where has that optimism gone in New Zealand? We weren’t far off this just a few years ago.
AIA Gold Medalist, Kirstin Thompson, then made the case for schools as the foundations of community and civic infrastructure. Their design matter. They are one of our few remaining civic building types left. They can create a sense of place, a sense of belonging, speak about our culture/s for students internally and reach out as the centre of the community. Things we have maybe stopped talking about in NZ.
KTA’s project at Preston South Primary School particularly impressed. Along with its placemaking and contribution to the community, it is built to the Passivhaus Standard. Although it doesn’t seem to be Certified Passivhaus, Australia is quietly building a collection of high-performance education buildings. It feels we might be picked up by the thought police for even thinking about it in NZ.
A standout site visit was All Hallows School. This is the oldest surviving secondary school on a site overlooking the iconic Story Bridge (part of the conference logo). I was struck by 164 years of building knitted together, how much history a school could contain while being utterly modern.
A lovely project from Fulton Trotter knitted together several parts of this campus while also creating a library and circulation space. This juxtaposition of old and new also came through in the presentation of AI. One path could be to make our learning more human, not less, with more assessment by interview or discussion now, as essays are less reliable. Universities were talking about changes in their spaces to accommodate this. Could this change schools, too?
A presentation from Doc Fiona Young and The Mayfield Project both looked at creating better spaces for people by harnessing the feedback of users. The Mayfield Project pointed to issues with a traditional Post Occupancy Evaluation, where an “expert” might make a short visit, before writing a report that almost no one reads.
Fiona utilised the feedback of staff and students to make some poorly functioning spaces work with relatively minor interventions. The Mayfield Project envisaged a global portal for collecting user feedback, with this data helping to make better places for people.
The future can be more human, with technology as a tool and schools at the centre of our communities.
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